


Epistolic

by thedevilchicken



Series: Epistolic [1]
Category: The Following
Genre: M/M, Rough Sex, Sexual Content, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-20 22:01:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2444711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the end of season 2, Joe tries to make contact. Ryan reacts, but will he respond?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Epistolic

Joe writes him letters. 

He received the first without knowing what it was and he opened it, sitting on a stool in his kitchen, over a bowl of cereal he'd left a minute too long. He almost choked on a mouthful of soggy Cornflakes as he unfolded the paper and saw his own name there in Joe's familiar, inimitable hand. He didn't choke, of course; he dropped the letter and hacked up the mouthful of cereal on top of it, found himself sitting there with narrowed eyes trained on the whole awful mess as the milk started to blur the black ink.

Since then, he's known what to look out for. Since then, he hasn't been particularly shocked when the letters arrive. After the first few weeks, he even started to expect them. 

Joe writes once a week, every week, without fail, and at first Ryan ignored it. He'd meant what he said when they took Joe away with absolute sincerity: he didn't want to see him, he didn't want to hear from him, he wanted no contact whatsoever because it was his true intention to move on. Yes, okay, so he couldn't exactly forget him; every now and then one of his students would bring up the original case when they talked about sexual sadists, or they'd ask about Havenport when discussing serial killers' inevitable fans, or there'd be an awkward question about the Koban cult when religious killing was on the agenda. But if Claire was his past then so was Joe and for the first two months he didn't read a single word.

And then, one cold morning, the heat in the lecture hall was out and class was cancelled. He went up to his office and tried to dry out his boots and socks in front of the heater while his sat barefoot on the beaten-up old couch he'd inherited from his predecessor, a lesson plan on his lap and a biro in his hand that he'd compulsively chewed on one morning at the dull-as-rocks faculty meeting. It was snowing outside. It had been snowing on and off for weeks and frankly the cold was wearing on him. His mind wandered far away from students and lesson plans. And the next thing he knew, he was sitting there shivering as he read through nine weeks of Joe's letters one after the other, checking postmarks to make sure he read them in order like somehow that was important when he'd never meant to read them at all.

It was all just standard Joe back then, of course. He wrote his letters the same way he spoke, pompous with a flair for the dramatic, text and speech so alike that Ryan could almost hear his voice as he read. The first couple were faintly regretful in tone, at least when it came to the fact that he'd found himself incarcerated once again, something bitter about prison orange really not suiting his complexion. Then the tone turned, the subject veered entirely off course, and it was like reading his damned novel all over again, or maybe a couple of lost chapters from it. Ryan _really_ wished they'd stayed lost because frankly, Joe was never going to be remembered for his wishy-washy neo-gothic fiction.

The ninth letter, the last he read that day, was different again, different completely. It was like a confession but not a confession, like maybe Joe had decided what he really needed was a therapist - or maybe just a really good friend - to talk through all his problems. It was twelve pages long, front and back - Joe apparently had a lot of problems, like that was surprising. It was personal. It was downright _intimate_ and it dwelled more than Ryan liked on his motives for killing. And the second-to-worst thing was, he never actually admitted a goddamn thing in all those pages, like he was still looking for some kind of plausible deniability. The worst thing was, Ryan couldn't put the damn thing down.

He read them weekly after that, despite himself. He started to slip the letter into his bag with his laptop and his notebook and take it to work the day it arrived, maybe so Max wouldn't see it but maybe just so he didn't have to think about Joe in his home. Joe had already done enough to his home life. He might not read it right away, though; sometimes he'd leave the letter locked in his desk drawer under a pile of papers he needed to grade or used it to mark his place in the textbook for the class he was preparing. Then, a couple of days later, he'd open the envelope with his penknife, sit down on the couch and read the letter over coffee. Half a cup would be left standing cold by the time he finished.

Joe never misses a week. Sometimes the letter's delayed a day or two but Ryan figures that's the prison postal system in action rather than a delay in Joe's great epistolary endeavour. Sometimes they're so long it's like that's all Joe's done all week. Sometimes it's half a page and barely that, not that Joe exactly has a full social schedule there on death row. But they're always like some new piece of Joe's brain crawled right out onto the page and introduced itself. It's compulsive reading. Ryan hates that he couldn't stop if he tried. 

He doesn't know when the content turned darker, exactly. The thing with Joe is he makes everything dark, gives everything a perverse double meaning even when all he's doing is writing a letter, and discerning the moment when the letters turned from bad to worse was a point that started to eat at Ryan's spare time. Carrie started to ask questions about why he was being so distant and he told her he was busy at work, the students were needy, there were midterms to grade and the department head wanted him to take on more responsibility, something about admissions interviews that left him more irritable than usual at the end of the day. That was all true, sure, but he was rereading Joe's letters over and over to try to find that turning point or some alternate meaning, some notion he'd missed, some meaning he hadn't quite grasped, some new plan buried in the prose. 

But there was nothing to find, nothing he'd missed. Joe was being earnest in those letters, at least as much as he knew how to be. He told Ryan all about his urges, all the ideas in his head, his idle daydreams as he sat in his cell day by day, watching the time tick by. They became ever more graphic, ever more lurid, descriptions of the curve and shine of a blade, a dead woman's long blonde hair, the warmth of blood on his skin. It was a feeling Ryan knew quite well; it was all the more upsetting because of that. Worse: it was by far the best damn prose that Joe Carroll had ever produced, his fucking epistolary masterpiece of psychopathy, and it was written just for him. 

He doesn't know when the content turned sexual, exactly. He supposes it always was, in a way, given Joe's particular predilections, because he's always known that for Joe, killing has always been and will always be almost inextricably connected to sex. He'd describe the feeling of ending a life in such baldly forthright terms, stripped-down prose cataloguing the effects that it had on the beat of his heart, the knots of excitement in his stomach, the stiffness of his cock. He always liked to make love afterwards, like a celebration. His most passionate encounters had always been after a kill. It was pretty damn weird to see it written down in black and white but Ryan supposes he wasn't surprised by what he read. What surprised him was the first time a guy replaced the girl. 

Joe had never shown any signs of homosexual desire before that, at least not that Ryan knew of and he knew the guy pretty damn well. He'd killed women out of some twisted need for sexual release but men, when he'd killed a man it had always been from necessity. So when that week's letter described the angles of a male body, hard planes of muscle, an earthy smell of fresh sweat and toothpaste and hair gel, rough hands, an Adam's apple, it was shocking. Severing the man's carotid was orgasmic in Joe's writing, something beautifully sexual. He described the copper taste of blood and fading warmth, the intimacy of the moment ebbing away into stark, cold loss. Ryan went over to Carrie's place that night and fucked her up against a wall, hard and wordless as he resolutely locked away the contents of that letter in the office drawer in his head. 

The letters carried on that way, week after week. Ryan supposes he could've complained and gotten the letters stopped, called in a favour with the Bureau or turned in the letters to the prison warden and gotten Joe's mail more closely monitored. He guesses the fact that they're coming to him and they all know his name is the only reason they keep coming the way they do, considering they talk so frankly about Joe's sick dreams and desires. He's asked about it and he's the only one Joe writes to. People come to visit but Joe won't see them. He keeps himself to himself these days, as much as that's nothing like his narcissistic nature. 

But the letters carried on that way, week after week, though Ryan never sent a reply. Sometimes they were women he described and sometimes men, sometimes both. Sometimes Ryan thinks Joe's talking about Claire or maybe Emma, thinks he recognises a detail only he would know. Sometimes it's the heroine from his book, and maybe that's Claire too or maybe not. Sometimes it's Ryan he's describing. The first time he realised that, he almost threw up his morning Cornflakes and coffee before he sat back down to finish reading. 

He didn't mention his name, of course, but of course he didn't have to. Suddenly, the penny dropped and what Joe had written on and off for months made sense in a new, jarring way that Ryan hadn't even stopped to consider before then: there was something to the turn of phrase, something personal in a way Joe never used when he spoke about the others, a shorthand only Ryan was meant to understand. Then the guy in the letter had blue eyes and scars though the details were trailed like breadcrumbs through eight or nine other letters. Joe was fantasising about him. Joe wanted him dead and that was nothing new but the symbolism of the knife pressed slowly up into his belly, the blood and the beating of his heart, was clear enough. He reread three times to be sure. Joe didn't want a best friend anymore; Joe wanted a lover. 

For the next few weeks, he tried not to read the letters when they came. He threw himself into work, actually graded the finals on time and had dinner with Max and Mike when they asked. They got engaged and he was happy for them in his own weird way; he guesses they're good together, screwed up as they are on an individual basis, odd as it is to think of Mike as his nephew. But as much as he tried he read the letters anyway, just a couple of days later than usual, telling himself he was reluctant, telling himself this was the last time, the last one, no more. And there was Joe, telling him about his week in prison, telling him everything he loved about Poe, telling him how he resents his own lack of talent as an author. There was Joe, telling him he misses their conversations, Ryan's frankness, his dry wit, his voice. 

One letter was an imagined dialogue between the two of them, both parts written by Joe because Ryan had never even thought about writing a reply. The tone was just right, Ryan thought - he could almost hear them both as he read. Joe's penchant for hyperbole had been diminishing for months and it turned out that he could be incisive in the most unsettling way. Nothing was out of character, from the verbal sparring to the desperate fist-fight to Ryan's hands grasping at Joe's throat. He could almost feel Joe's hands slipping under the back of his shirt, blunt nails raking hard at the small of his back. He could almost see Joe's dark eyes darken deeper, hear him gasp for breath. When Joe described the kiss, the taste of coffee and the faintest hint of sweet-metal blood from someone's just-split lip, the warmth of a slippery tongue, teeth, pressure, hearts pounding with adrenaline, Ryan could almost feel it all. 

He put his fist through a cupboard door and tore up the letter with blood dripping from his knuckles. Two days later, he taped it back together and put it back with the others. 

The night they caught Mark Gray, Mike called to let him know. Carrie had landed some fancy new job that kept her out of town a whole lot more often and that sucked because it meant he had no one else to celebrate with now that it was all _really_ over. Everyone was dead or jailed. It was finally done. He had dinner with Mike and Max at their place just a few blocks over and caught a celebratory cab home though he'd usually walk, and landed in bed sometime past midnight. It was done, he told himself. There was no one left who wanted him dead, at least no one except Joe and he was used to that.

He woke at 2am. 2.03, to be precise, according to the clock by the bed. He'd heard something but didn't really know what, lay there in the dark as he strained to hear it again but there was nothing audible above the hum of the streets outside the windows. The sheets were wrapped around his feet and he kicked them free, stopped abruptly when _something_ made a sound. Silence. Had he made the sound himself? Had something fallen off the bed or a neighbour upstairs opened a closet door, something completely innocuous, something completely fine? He pulled the gun from the nightstand and slipped from the bed in his boxers anyway. Nothing was ever fine. 

The floor was cold under his feet as he moved from the bedroom to the hall. The office door was still closed the way he'd left it but he checked quickly anyway before he moved on, jerking around doorways like he'd never left the Bureau, the muscle memory still there like he supposes it always will be. There was nothing anywhere he looked and he was breathing a sigh of relief when he went down, was knocked down, swept off his feet and sprawling on the floor with the gun skidding away under the couch. His cheek hit the floor and sent a hot flash of pain through his head and neck. Winded, coughing, he struck out and his fist caught something, someone's jaw, knocked them off him. He followed through, followed over until he was on top of the attacker, forearm barred across their throat. He pulled off their baseball cap with his other hand and froze with it in his grasp. He could make out his attacker's features now his eyes had adjusted to the thin light that filtered through the blinds. 

"Joe," he said, his voice hoarse. 

"Ryan." 

He looked at Joe, pressed down on the floor under him. Joe looked at him, dark eyes darker in the dimly lit room. He moved his hands and Ryan reacted, caught his wrists, pinned them down above his head though the movement caused him to lean in closer, closer than was comfortable, closer than he wanted to be or not as close as he wanted. He was confused. His heart was hammering. Joe's lip was bleeding. He had no idea what he was going to do next until he did it.

It was a tangle of lips and teeth and tongues, fingers in hair, hands pulling at clothing. It was too fast and not fast enough, his head knocking against the floor, elbows and knees clattering against floor panels and chair legs as Ryan pulled off Joe's shirt and Joe helped him along. Abundant chest hair against his own bare chest felt strange but not as strange as Joe's erection hot and pressed against his own once Joe's pants were shoved down to his knees and Ryan's boxers followed suit. Joe's hips lifted against him, grinding them together as his hands went down to Ryan's backside, pulling him in tighter against him, almost too tight, almost on the edge of painful but he supposed that was the point. Ryan bit roughly at Joe's jawline, made him make a sound so close to a moan that a little jolt of perverse excitement went right through Ryan's belly to the tip of his cock. He'd never wanted anything less than he wanted this, and never wanted anything more. 

Joe seemed barely able to catch his breath as he moved beneath him, almost struggling but not really. Ryan didn't know whether to fuck him or fight him or just up and call the feds so he just rubbed against him wildly until the friction of Joe's fingertips rubbing against his asshole made him come unexpectedly over Joe's belly, shuddering, with a strangled little groan. He bit at Joe's neck and tasted blood. He still had one hand pressed at Joe's neck, making him fight for every breath. Apparently, Joe liked that; when Joe came just moments later, he put a knife to Ryan's throat. 

The sting of the cut was what woke him, sweaty and disturbed. He was fucking Joe Carroll in his dreams. So much for moving on.

The letters kept on coming. Ryan started reading them at home, alone, sitting in his office with the door closed like that made it any different or any better, any less seedy. He couldn't deny it anymore, at least not to himself, that Joe was still in his home life. He'd stroke himself as he read, hating himself for it but hating Joe more. The descriptions he read became darker still, more desperate, more obscene, fraught with the desire that had been so painfully lacking in Joe's poor novel. The victims became exclusively male. Sometimes they don't die. Sometimes all they do is drink a glass of scotch - another idea that Ryan hates himself for liking. Or they'll talk for hours or they'll fight or they'll fuck. Though the victims are never named, Ryan knows that all of them are him.

Joe is a glutton for sensation, has a knack for expressing it in writing though real depth of human sentiment still seems to elude him. He describes the heat and weight and closeness of a body, the smell of shampoo in freshly-washed hair, a shared glass of wine and the warmth of an open fire. He describes death just the way Ryan knows it, several ways he doesn't and doesn't ever want to. He describes the moment of penetration in such vivid detail that Ryan almost feels it, can almost feel himself inside Joe or Joe inside of him. He can see himself naked, riding Joe's cock on his apartment floor while Joe laughs and pulls down on his hips, bucking up into him. He can see them both in his bed in half light, one hand pressed between Joe's shoulder blades and one gripping hard at his hip as he fucks him slow and deep, Joe groaning into a pillow, calling him creatively insulting names. They bicker the whole way through, between gasped breaths, Joe's hips pushing back greedily against him; Joe's witty in spite of his narcissistic psychopathy, even in Ryan's head. He comes imagining it, ashamed but not nearly enough to stop. 

It's been more than a year now. It's almost 18 months, measured by the 67 letters locked away in Ryan's desk drawer, the ink faded, the paper worn. The wear from rereading makes his favourites obvious. He wishes he could stop, but he knows he won't.

The problem is, he's killed so many people by this point that he barely knows how to do anything else. He's a teacher and that's satisfying in its own way, yeah, sure, but it never really feels like him because maybe Mike and Max were right: all of this life was just a show he put on for Joe, to lure him out, to make him angry so he'd make a mistake. He teaches because Joe taught. He sobered up to be able to catch him and kill him, not that the latter went exactly according to plan. Now he's got nothing left but the life he made because of Joe and a past he can't forget, the mundane punctuated here and there by death. It's hard not to see it in his future, too. He's wondered what it's like to die and on the other hand what it's like to be Joe, if what Joe feels when he kills is anything like he feels himself. He's enjoyed it sometimes, he thinks, though he tells himself that's only because they deserved it, because they had it coming, they'd have done the same to him. He wonders if he and Joe aren't so dissimilar after all, and it turns his stomach that he can't say it's untrue. There but for the grace of God, as much as the atheist in him find that completely hysterical.

Perhaps that's why it doesn't feel wrong the day he walks into the courtroom at Joe's appeal. He sneaks into the back row but maybe that's why he doesn't flinch when he sees him. Joe looks gaunt, like he's losing weight but gaining muscle, he looks leaner, harder, though the same old smile still plays at his lips. Ryan wants to take out a gun and shoot him in the head, make him dead right then and there, make the people scream as Joe Carroll bleeds out on the floor - he imagines every detail as the session gets underway. He wants to cause a scene and break him out, take him with him, he could do it if he put his mind to it. He wants to find him during a recess, let himself quietly into the room, suck him and fuck him and beat him and curse him, hurt him and please him until he begs but can't say what for. He wants to bury his face in the crook of Joe's neck and sob himself sick. He does none of those things. Joe's defending himself; Ryan listens to him speak for a few short minutes, ascertains that Joe's still Joe and could never, will never change, then he makes himself leave before he's seen at all, though somewhere inside he knows he wants to be seen. 

He goes home via the Chinese place on the corner with the egg rolls he likes. He makes coffee, drinks a cup then gets another as if caffeine will work the way that vodka always used to. And then he fishes his notebook and a chewed black biro from his bag, and he sits down at the table. 

_Dear Joe_ , he writes. _I don't know where to start._


End file.
